Floris van Zyl is a South African Expressionist painter who studied graphic design and worked as a designer in his own design agency over 17 years and returned to painting full time in 2010.
In just over 11 years he created more than 800 artworks, including around 600 oil paintings. They have sold locally and internationally and include landscapes, still life images, portraits and self-portraits. His work is characterised by bold, symbolic colours, and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork. One of the themes in Van Zyl`s work is to take things apart: to take realism and make it abstract by using a palette knife, to extend the paint beyond the boundaries of the form we know.
To paint, you need 3 things: the eye, the hand and the heart.
This is what making art teaches me: to not be afraid of making mistakes. The journey is constant, between listening to the inner voice and making the choice to take an action. The minute you make a decision, if you feel it is disharmonious with some other plane of existence, you must go back inside again.
Sooner or later in our evolutionary process, each of us begins to realise that it's not the having that fulfils our soul, but rather it's the act of creating that brings us satisfaction.
